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Is the cannabis industry too profitable for mass legalization?

CBS recently did a story about a California man who was selling off his huge retail store. The first offer to buy it came from someone who wants to turn the vast space in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains into an indoor weed farm.

The realtor, a conservative churchgoer, initially balked at the deal; the store-owner jumped at it.

“The realtor,” said the owner, “may be anti-drug, but he’s pro-money.”

Of course he is, and if he wants to make any, he’ll get with the program.

With weed being legal, in some form, in 29 states, prohibitionists are fighting an uphill battle when it comes to the economy and the free market.

Unless the prohibitionists lighten up, the feds and state governments will continue to miss out on billions in pot earnings.

Already a multi-billion dollar business, including the $28 billion that states could reap in tax revenue, anyone with any brains and/or business sense is going to get on the weed industry bandwagon, which includes so very many aspects.

“When people think of cannabis, they think of the growing and selling of plants,” Danny Davis, a managing partner at Convectium, a marijuana business services company, told CBS News. “But companies are making major investments in extraction equipment to provide oils, tinctures and waxes.”

Yes, they are. Some project that the next billion-dollar market will be testing labs.

Lab testing for potency, purity and detailed information such as terpene counts, earned nearly a billion dollars in 2016.

Now, with increased demand for MMJ and legalized recreational pot on the rise, testing labs could be worth $1.4 billion by 2021, with an annual growth rate of more than 10 percent.

The CBS report was fascinated by the portability of weed these days: vape pens, edibles, concentrates, etc., quoting market research showing that: “People are veering more toward concentrates and edibles that serve their specific needs.”

This, of course, doesn’t mean joints have gone out of style, but it does mean that vaping concentrates is a game changer.

The premise of the report was to decide whether weed, in its many forms, is too damn lucrative to be illegal, despite the Jeff Sessions of the world who stridently ignore cannabis science and would love to lock up thousands of pot consumers if he could.

The investors, business people and wannabes of the world realize that marijuana is the next booming industry and therefore should be quickly legalized.

A case in point:

California, the nation’s biggest agricultural state, which legalized recreational weed this past November, was already a major pot-producer.

Now, the Golden State’s weed crop is larger than the next five leading agricultural crops combined.

Who wouldn’t want to be part of the fastest growing industry in the United States that is projected to create nearly 300,000 new jobs by 2020?